Eula Hall, One-Woman Relief Agency in Appalachia, Dies at 93
Calling herself a “hillbilly activist,” she started a health care clinic and offered other services in chronically underserved eastern Kentucky.
Eula Hall in 1991 at the Mud Creek Clinic in Grethel, Ky., where she offered counseling, health care, benefits guidance and more.Credit.Stanley McCleave for The New York Times
May 15, 2021, 12:49 p.m. ET
Eula Hall was a tireless health care activist so tireless that she wasn t about to let an arsonist slow her down.
Among many other things, Mrs. Hall operated the Mud Creek Clinic in eastern Kentucky for mountain people, many of them coal miners and members of their families. One night in 1982, someone looking for drugs set fire to the place. When her patients showed up the next morning to find that the clinic was gone, Mrs. Hall did not miss a beat. She and a doctor set up shop on a picnic table, had a phone installed on a nearby tree and kept their appointments.